1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a drug fractional system using generic group codes and universal drug numbers and a method thereof. More particularly, the drug registered with the generic group codes in the system is able to determine whether it is a single component or composite formulation. The universal drug numbers are also registered corresponding to the generic group codes for crosschecking. So that, an individual drug is easily identified and recognized the maker's name and a trade name.
2. Related Prior Art
As well known in related arts, a drug is a chemical substance which is edible, applicable and/or injectable to organisms including human beings, in order to cure diseases, to remedy injuries, and/or to prevent the disease.
For pharmaceutical applications in which such drugs and/or chemical substances are mostly managed, a number of information including, for example, constitutional components of a drug, interaction between two or more drugs, side effects, instruction for administration of medicines, etc. are required. Especially, the physicians and/or pharmacists wish to get information of the recent medical news and advanced medicines.
However, such medicines are generally divided into numerous types of drugs such as anti-diaarhoeal drugs, analgesics, antibiotics, neuroleptics, and the like, based on medical efficacies thereof. Although about 6,000 drug species for medical application and about 3,400 drug species for surgical application have been currently known, even physicians or pharmacists sometimes do not understand quite well about various efficacies and/or constitutional ingredients of all of these medicines.
Meanwhile, since those are not skilled in the art generally lack detailed knowledge of medicines and may not understand specific efficacies of a drug only with name thereof. As disclosed above, since there are many kinds of drugs available, problems of misunderstanding efficacies of such drugs may be entailed, leading to serious accidents caused by abuse, misuse and/or adverse effects of medicines.
According to Public Notice No. 2000-33 of the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare, “Principal Drug Component Code Index” was published on 1 Jul., 2000, in complying with provisions of Article 24, Item 3 of Enforcement Decree of National Health Insurance Act and Article 8, Item 2 of National Health Care Payment Standard Regulation.
Following this, Korean Food and Drug Administration (KFDA) progresses a project to prepare Standard Code for Medical Components. The foregoing principal drug component code was revised twice with additional components and about 6,200 items are recoded in the principal drug component code in January, 2004.
The principal drug component code managed by KFDA has been set in nine-digit number (N: number, A: English alphabet)
1111-11-A-AA (e.g., 2243-01-ATB)
However, such existing code encounters the following problems:
Classification of medicines based on the component code is executed by sorting whether a drug comprises a single component or a composite formulation (containing at least two components) and endowing a serial number as the code to each of 4,500 single formulations and 1,400 composite formulations.
Briefly, the first four-digit numeral means a component, the next two-digit numeral represents content thereof, and the last three alphabets means a formulation containing the component.
Accordingly, a single formulation may be easily found during search of a drug but it is impossible to search a composite formulation with the first four-digit numeral. Random comparison of composite formulations with the code is a very hard and difficult work. In particular, different codes are often endowed to the same item or different items sometimes have the same code, thus reducing overall consistency in code definition.
Especially, for a composite formulation containing, e.g., about 20 kinds of vitamins, a correct code of the formulation is substantially not searched with the generic principal component (that is, vitamin).
Due to the foregoing problem, the principal drug component code index was abolished on Apr. 26, 2004 (Public Notice No. 2004-27 of Ministry of Health and Welfare). Afterward, the foregoing code index is under management of Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (“HIRAS”) additional items, to which some items are added.
Accordingly, it was known that the conventional component code composed of serial numbers and alphabets with nine digits is insufficient to classify numerous and various medicines and has problems of not simply or correctly searching desired drugs.
In every month, about 1,000 trade names of medicaments are newly registered in Korea. Therefore, owing to a great amount of information for drugs under management, search of a particular drug using a drug name or trade name thereof is economically disadvantageous and encounters a problem of delayed registration of drug information. In addition, if the current system for classification of drugs using drug names is continued, the number of digits to express a drug code is continuously increased. Consequently, further additional medicines cannot be managed with the current drug codes.